Our work centers on aspects of crafting creativity that are often overlooked in digital fabrication: playful- ness, and possibilities for social engagement. We draw from precedents in both crafting (e.g. quilting bees) and gameplay (e.g. “Exquisite Corpse”) to inform the design of a set of turn-based collaborative games which center a computer-controlled embroidery machine as a “player” in games for one or more crafters. We proto- type these games using our own computational input/ output embroidery pipeline and observe how they can guide crafter-players to engage with physical, digital, and social affordances. We summarize our findings on how creative focus can shift over a playful experience of fabrication and how technology can mediate social crafting.

Wearables have emerged as an increasingly promising interactive platform, imbuing the human body with always-available computational capabilities. This unlocks a wide range of applications, including discreet information access, health monitoring, fitness, and fashion. However, unlike previous platforms, wearable electronics require structural conformity, must be comfortable for the wearer, and should be soft, elastic, and aesthetically appealing. We envision a future where electronics can be temporarily attached to the body (like bandages or party masks), but in functional and aesthetically pleasing ways. Towards this vision, we introduce ElectroDermis, a fabrication approach that simplifies the creation of highly-functional and stretchable wearable electronics that are conformal and fully untethered by discretizing rigid circuit boards into individual components. These individual components are wired together using stretchable electrical wiring and assembled on a spandex blend fabric, to provide high functionality in a robust form-factor that is reusable. We describe our system in detail- including our fabrication parameters and its operational limits-which we hope researchers and practitioners can leverage. We describe a series of example applications that illustrate the feasibility and utility of our system. Overall, we believe ElectroDermis offers a complementary approach to wearable electronics-one that places value on the notion of impermanence (i.e., unlike tattoos and implants), better conforming to the dynamic nature of the human body.

MovIPrint is a user-friendly, interactive installation that uses software and a depth-sensing camera to capture human body movement. After inputting digital data such as images or video into the software, MovIPrint offers people innovative and user-friendly ways to explore that data by manipulating it with their body movement. We use media content and/or wireframe design to enable people to then fabricate their own moving images and 3D digital models.

In this paper, we explore personalized morphing food that enhances traditional food with new HCI capabilities, rather than replacing the chef and authentic ingredients (e.g. flour) with an autonomous machine and heterogeneous mixtures (e.g. gel). Thus, we contribute a unique transformation mechanism of kneaded and sheeted flour-based dough, with an integrated design strategy for morphing food during two general cooking methods: dehydration (e.g. baking) or hydration (e.g. water boiling). We also enrich the design space of morphing food by demonstrating several applications. We end by discussing hybrid cooking between human and a design tool that we developed to ensure accuracy while preserving customizability for morphing food.